Chapter One — Part Two
The Weight of Maps - Part Two - The ancient lost temple and ashram of the Puranas
That first night in Nandipara, sleep did not come easily. At lower altitudes, one imagines sleep as a simple biological event, something automatic and dependable. In the higher Himalayas, however, sleep becomes negotiation. The lungs object. The cold enters through invisible openings in tent cloth and woollen blankets. The body, uncertain of oxygen and altitude, keeps surfacing repeatedly from shallow dreams as though unwilling to surrender itself entirely to unconsciousness.
I lay awake for a long time listening to the mountain night. It was not silence.
People who have never spent time in the Himalayas often speak reverentially about “the silence of the mountains,” but that silence does not truly exist. The mountains are full of sound. One simply had to remain still enough to hear the mountains properly. The night around Nandipara was full of movement disguised as silence. Wind dragged itself slowly across the rock faces above the village with a sound like rough cloth pulled over stone. Somewhere in the darkness, mule bells clinked intermittently as the animals shifted in their sleep. Far below, unseen water moved through narrow channels with cold and relentless determination. Old timber beams creaked inside the village houses as temperatures dropped further into the night, and now and then the distant barking of dogs travelled briefly through the valley before dissolving into the mountain air once again.
Once, very late into the night, something heavier moved along the slope above the village. Perhaps a mule that had slipped its tether. Perhaps a Himalayan goat. Perhaps only falling rock. In the mountains, uncertainty itself becomes part of the landscape.
I turned carefully inside the sleeping bag, moving with the cautious precision of a man who had learned that sudden movements now carried consequences. My knees protested immediately, sharp little reminders from the climb beyond Trishul-ki-Chatti earlier in the day. The left shoulder had stiffened badly as well, perhaps from leaning too heavily on the trekking pole during one of the steeper ascents. Even breathing required attention at this altitude. The cold air entering the lungs felt strangely thin and incomplete, as though the mountains rationed oxygen with deliberate restraint.
Lying there in the dim darkness of the small room beside the tea shed kitchen, I found myself thinking that aging was, fundamentally, a prolonged negotiation with one’s own body. At thirty, the body obeys without discussion. At sixty-three, it asks questions first. Sometimes it refuses outright.\n\nI smiled faintly to myself, remembering the younger version of me who had once travelled with unnecessary confidence and very little preparation. That younger man had believed intellect could dominate discomfort. He would have mocked the elaborate caution with which I now approached even modest journeys into difficult terrain. The labelled medicines. The thermals folded carefully into waterproof bags. The dietary restrictions obeyed in cities and selectively abandoned in mountains.
The absurd folding stool packed among ropes and notebooks because prolonged sitting on rock now caused my lower back to tighten painfully for hours afterward. The younger me would certainly have laughed at the hot-water bags, the extra woollen layers, the insistence on proper camp arrangements before sunset. Yet lying there in the Himalayan cold, listening to the distant movement of wind beyond the village, I realised I did not entirely resent the transformation. Age strips performance from ambition. One no longer travels to impress either the world or oneself. Perhaps that is the only real mercy growing older offers.
The tea shed owner, Himmat Singh, had given me the smaller room beside the kitchen because he suspected correctly that I would not tolerate the cold inside the outer tent after sunset. The room smelled of damp wool, smoke, and old cedar planks darkened by decades of winter soot. A faded calendar bearing the image of Kedarnath Temple hung crookedly beside the doorway. Someone had pasted newspaper across a crack in the wall to reduce the draft.
I found the small room beside the tea shed kitchen oddly comforting, perhaps because it felt inhabited by survival rather than tourism. Nothing in it had been arranged for aesthetic effect. The rough wooden walls carried decades of smoke stains, the blankets smelled faintly of cedar, damp wool, and old winters, and every object in the room seemed to exist because it had once been necessary. Outside, sometime deep into the night, the wind rose briefly and rattled something metallic near the mule enclosure before settling again into uneasy silence.
Then came the bells once more—soft, irregular, distant enough to feel uncertain. The sound drifted through the darkness like fragments of memory colliding somewhere beyond sight. Unable to sleep further, I finally sat up and wrapped a thick shawl around myself before stepping outside. The cold struck immediately. Not violently. Precisely. It was the kind of Himalayan cold that enters the body with professional efficiency, locating weakness without hesitation—through the knees, the fingertips, the lungs, the old injuries one had almost forgotten.
Above Nandipara, however, the sky had cleared entirely. The stars over the higher Himalayas have always disturbed me slightly. In cities, the sky remains distant, softened by dust, smoke, and electric light. In the mountains, especially at such altitudes, the sky presses downward with uncomfortable intimacy. The stars appeared too numerous, too sharp, too immediate, as though I were standing beneath some exposed celestial mechanism rather than beneath ordinary night. I walked slowly toward the edge of the slope overlooking the valley, placing each step carefully upon the uneven ground. Very carefully. One careless movement in darkness, one loose stone beneath the foot, and a lifetime of scholarship would reduce itself abruptly into obituary material for the next morning’s conversation in Nandipara.
The village below remained mostly asleep. Only one house still showed light through a narrow crack in the shutters. Somewhere nearby, someone coughed continuously with the deep, tearing cough of mountain winters and wood smoke.
I stood there for several minutes breathing slowly, allowing the lungs to adjust themselves to the thin Himalayan air while moonlight settled gradually over the upper ridges beyond Nandipara. At night the mountains looked unreal, though not in the sentimental or mystical manner that travel writers often describe. They seemed older than mysticism itself. Vast, unfinished formations abandoned midway by geological time, as though the earth had once begun thinking immense thoughts there and then simply stopped. The ridgelines glimmered faintly beneath the moon, their outlines appearing and disappearing through drifting veils of cloud. Nothing in that landscape suggested welcome or hostility.
The mountains merely existed with overwhelming indifference. And standing there in layered winter clothing, my woollen cap pulled low against the wind and my oversized jacket making me appear even broader than I already was, I became suddenly aware of the strange absurdity of my own presence in that immense terrain. What exactly was I doing there? The question did not arrive dramatically. It came quietly, almost politely, and therefore carried greater force. I was a retired professor, sixty-three years old, overweight, increasingly breathless at altitude, and retired without the comfort of a proper pension that might have allowed old age to become financially graceful. Most sensible men in my position would have settled into predictable routines—lectures, consultancy work, occasional academic conferences, perhaps carefully planned family visits.
Instead, I had travelled north of Dharchula into the upper Himalayas searching for a lost ashram connected to obscure Purāṇic references, cryptic Vedic geography, and fragmentary traditions that many modern scholars considered symbolic at best and fictional at worst. Standing beneath the immense Himalayan sky, I realised how improbable my life must appear even to myself.
Any sensible person would have remained in Pune or Mumbai or Chennai, conducting respectable archival work and occasionally appearing on academic panels to discuss “civilizational narratives.” Instead, I was standing there freezing beside a forgotten Himalayan hamlet because certain ancient verses refused to leave me alone.
The thought was ridiculous enough to make me laugh softly at myself. The sound disappeared immediately into the valley. That is another thing the mountains do well. They absorb human certainty without effort. For several minutes afterward, I simply stood watching moonlight drift slowly across the upper ridges while my thoughts wandered wherever they pleased. Memory becomes increasingly undisciplined with age.
It no longer moves in proper sequence like responsible storytelling. It drifts without warning from one decade into another. One thought opens another. A smell becomes a conversation. A sound becomes a room from thirty years ago.
Standing there above Nandipara in the cold Himalayan wind, I suddenly remembered my wife—not from recent months after retirement, but from a much earlier period of our marriage when we were still young enough to argue energetically about foolish things and recover from them by the next morning.
She had returned from work one evening to discover the dining table completely buried beneath Survey of India maps, tracing sheets, notebooks, loose papers, and photocopies of Sanskrit verses weighted down by steel tumblers because the ceiling fan kept scattering them. I still remember the expression on her face. Not anger exactly. Exhaustion mixed with resignation.
“What now?” she had asked, placing her handbag carefully on the chair because every other available surface in the house had apparently been occupied by my latest obsession. At that time I had been attempting to correlate references from the Srimad Bhagavatam with older pilgrimage routes north of Kurukshetra.
I looked up excitedly. “I think I have identified a possible connection between an old route mentioned in the Skanda Purana and the Adi Badri temple region,” I announced, with the unnecessary intensity of a man who has forgotten that other people have not been thinking about the same subject for six continuous hours.
She stared at me silently. Then she removed her sandals slowly and said, in that dangerously calm voice wives develop after many years of marriage, “Normal husbands buy furniture after twenty years.”
“I bought furniture,” I protested immediately.
“You bought bookshelves.”
“That is still furniture.”
“No,” she replied, walking into the kitchen. “Those are storage facilities for your addiction. We need a proper sofa set and a decent dining table before your papers become permanent members of the household.”
I remember following her into the kitchen attempting to defend myself with completely unreasonable seriousness.
“You are underestimating the geographical implications of these references.”
Without turning around, she replied, “And you are underestimating the geographical implications within this house of having nowhere left to eat dinner.”
Even now, standing in the upper Himalayas decades later, I could hear the precision of her voice so clearly that for a brief moment it felt as though she were somewhere behind me on the slope, still prepared to argue practically against my increasingly impractical fascinations. My wife continued to complain about these journeys even after retirement. Especially after retirement. According to her, retirement was supposed to make me sensible. Instead, it had made me geographically unstable.
“You have become worse,” she told me only three weeks before I left for Dharchula. “Earlier at least the Academy consumed some of your energy. Now you spend entire afternoons staring at maps and muttering about rivers changing course in the Mahabharata.”
“That is because rivers do change course. That is what Balarama and Vidura spoke about within the Mahabharata. It is there. Veda Vyasa wrote about it.”
“That is not the point.” She shook her head with visible despair. “You are sixty-three years old. Your knees hurt while climbing stairs in our own building. Yet now you want to wander into the Himalayas searching for hidden ashrams.”
“Not hidden,” I corrected automatically. “Forgotten.”
“That must be even worse.”
The memory made me smile again there in the cold darkness above Nandipara. The mountains have a dangerous habit of returning unfinished conversations to the mind. Perhaps altitude weakens the boundaries between memory and immediacy. Or perhaps loneliness simply becomes louder there. I remained outside longer than was sensible. Eventually the cold penetrated even the heavy Himalayan jacket I had purchased in Delhi after spending three absurd days researching “high-altitude layering systems” on the internet. Modern outdoor equipment companies describe mountain survival with the evangelical confidence of space agencies. Their catalogues speak of thermal engineering, wind resistance, moisture management, and alpine endurance as though jackets alone can negotiate with glaciers.
The mountains remain unimpressed by such language. By early morning, thin clouds had begun drifting upward through the valley below Nandipara. The village emerged gradually from mist, roof by roof, wall by wall, like something remembered incompletely from an old dream. Smoke rose again from the stone houses. Somewhere a mule snorted impatiently. A bell rang once near the small Nandi shrine. And beyond all of it, higher and further north, the unseen mountains waited with immense silence, as though withholding judgment on whether I deserved to continue further into them.
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